And from what I recall, many of us weren't all that thrilled about the LotR movies at the time they came out - yeah, it all looked great, music was great, acting was generally good or even great, but not all of the changes to the plot made much sense and a few of the supposedly 'cool' moments were downright absurd (remember Legolas on the makeshift skateboard?).

Then with the Hobbit, when they first said a split in two movies but with the White Council storyline added in, I thought it might still be okay - but when it went from two to three, it became almost inevitable that they'd need huge amounts of the silliness and uninteresting fodder that was already present here and there in LotR.

That, plus the more fundamental problem of the Hobbit being more of a children's book that risked losing its charm by translating it to an epic blockbuster, much more so than LotR.